The common, and cheap, crack pipe is simply a five inch long glasstube. To use it, the "rock" is placed about an inch in from the end opposite your mouth, and heated from below with a lighter. You have to be careful with this that the chemicals don't turn to liquid for very long before they evaporate, or they'll flow out the end of the pipe, or worse, into your mouth. I've heard that crack is fast about turning to smoke, while DMT tends to be liquid for quite a while. Do your research, maybe even do a test run with the pipe well away from your lips, as boiling hot liquid down your throat seems a poor way to start any drug experience. Another solution is to wad up steel wool into a ball and stuff it into one end. The rock can be melted against the wool, and the wool can be heated during inhalation to release any chemical it soaks up.

The other, safer kind of crack pipe is essentially a glasssphere with a verticaltube leading in, and a horizontal tube leading out. The rock is dropped in through the top, the sphere is heated, and the smoke is inhaled, carbureted with air from the vertical tube. These pipes are terrifically fragile, only usable as paraphernalia, and so large they are difficult to hide. If you own one, it should probably never leave your home.

If these are unavailable in your area, emergency crack pipes can be made out of damn near anything. The most popular version in my area is a light bulb with the base removed (done by heating it until the glue melts, and pulling off with pliers), and a hole drilled in the top. Glass drill bits are cheap at any hardware store, and light bulbs are available everywhere. If you decide to go this route, either get transparent light bulbs or spend a long time making sure the white powder is all out of the bulb before you smoke from it. You do not want to breathe that powder. If that isn't ghetto enough for you, you can always use an aluminum can with a hole cut in the side, or just heat up the rock on tinfoil and inhale the smoke through a straw.

What they would do is, in South America or wherever the coca is being grown, the factory (or something) that makes the cocaine into crack would actually heat the stuff to incredible temperatures, and then mold it into the shape of a PVC pipe. You know, the thick plastic pipes installed nowadays for hot water heaters and washing machines and stuff?

So, anyway, they'd load boxes of the crack pipes onto freighter jets bound for the USA. The drug sniffing dogs at the airport would obviously flag the pipes as being suspect, but upon the customs officials examining them, they would just find...PVC pipes. They were even marked and packed with styrofoam. They didn't look suspicious at all. The official would pick one up, sniff it, look at it, nothing wrong here. It's a just a PVC pipe, only it's made from solid crack cocaine.

Once in the country, it would be sold to dealers or kingpins or whoever's in charge of that sort of thing. They would just use a large metal object to break it down into sellable pieces, and voila, another few grams of crack on the streets of Los Angeles...

I lived there from roughly 1986-1990. At that time, anything north of 96th Street was known as “North of the DMZ” (demilitarised zone). My street was a good case in point: there were only two other inhabitable buildings. The others were either abandoned or had been torn down, leaving trash-filled lots. The opposite side of the street contained one long continuous brick wall, courtesy of the municipal bus depot facing Lexington Avenue. There were no trees, although one day workers with a flatbed truck full of saplings tried to remedy the situation. “Ed Koch, Mayor” was the only identifying insignia on the truck. Within a year of planting, all the trees were dead.

I had a five room, two-bedroom apartment for $540 a month, unheard of in Manhattan, unless you lived somewhere like I did. It was a five-story walkup with a solid steel front door. Street level, there was a social club, which blared salsa music on the weekends until three or four am. Calling a local bar a “private social club” was a faintly legal maneuver to avoid paying for a costly liquor license.

All my neighbors in the building were Puerto Rican, including Juan, the Super. He was blatantly obese and always seemed to be in a good mood, with a broad smile. He worked for the city, in the sewer system. Whenever the plumbing broke (which was often), I would go knock on his door downstairs. There were never less than 8-10 people inside; I could hear and smell food frying in the kitchen. He would come up, sweating with his toolbox, bringing one or two of his children. On the first visit, a little girl of about eight looked around and asked, “Where’s everyone else?”

I owned a second hand Datsun 280zx (remember t-tops?), that I was stupid enough to try to park on the street. I couldn’t afford to keep it in a garage, and had to move the damn car every day to comply with parking regulations. It was a stripped down model: three-speed automatic, no fancy rims and no radio (with corresponding NO RADIO sign in the window). One weekend on the golf course in Pelham Bay I found a little furry monkey headcover on the fairway, and put it on the gearshift. Two days later, someone threw a brick through the passenger window to steal it. Cost of replacement window/furry monkey: $280. One Saturday morning I arrived to find blood all over the driver-side window and hood.

One night after moving the car, I was walking back to my apartment, when I realized I had left a book I was reading on the passenger seat. I doubled back to fetch it, crossing the street this time to return. As I approached my apartment building, I passed two guys sitting on the steps of an abandoned building, sharing a crack pipe. I looked at them, and said “Hey” as I walked by. One of them nodded to me.

“We thought you were afraid to walk by us, man.”
“What?”
“We saw you park your car, and it looked like you were afraid to walk by us. We were saying how that was fucked up, you were judging us. But then you crossed the street again and walked here right in front of us. So it’s okay, man. We were wrong about you.”
“I wasn’t avoiding anybody, I just went back to get a book.”
“You got a nail in your tire.”
“What?”
“Your car got a nail in the front tire, man. I work in a fix-a-flat, and got this habit of looking at car tires all the time now. I can pull it out for you if you want.”

I glanced back at my car across the street, focusing on the tires. A silver nailhead, the size of a dime, reflected back at me.

“Where’s your shop?”
“The shop is closed. I can fix it right now—I got tools with me. If you wait ´til tomorrow, the tire will be flat.”
His logic was unassailable. “Okay.”

He had a black satchel at his feet, which I hadn’t noticed until then. He pulled out a tire iron and some kind of widget; it looked like a cross between a large wine opener and a wing nut. The tool screwed into the tire, with an empty, interior cavity that encircled the nail. The wine opener part pulled the nail out, with the rest of the tool still embedded in the tire. He placed a sort of rubber licorice stick into the cavity where the nail had been extracted, and screwed that back in. When it held fast, he extracted the entire tool. The tire looked perfect again; it hadn’t even lost air. He tossed the nail at my feet.

“That was fast,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”
“Nine dollars, 65 cent,” he said.

Where the hell he pulled nine dollars and 65 cents out of, I can only guess. It was probably what they charged at the shop he worked at. I gave him a 10 and told him to keep the change, but he shook his head, dug in his satchel again, and gave me the 35 cents back. I guess tips weren’t allowed at his shop, either.

“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem, man.”

I looked at him expectantly, but there was nothing more to say; our encounter was over. His buddy commenced to light up another rock, and I continued on to my apartment.